


At the End of the Day

by scarletbegonias37



Category: God’s Own Country, God’s Own Country (2017)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, cute lambs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 19:48:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13597101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarletbegonias37/pseuds/scarletbegonias37
Summary: Johnny wants to express how he feels but doesn’t know where to start.





	At the End of the Day

Every month -- hell, every week that Gheorghe stayed longer at the farm, the phrase gnawed more and more at Johnny’s insides, but for some reason, he could not seem to manage to force it out of his mouth. _It’s three lousy stinking words, you idiot_ , he berated himself, _just choke it out_. The problem was that Johnny had never said “I love you” to anyone in his entire life, and with the exception of a few occasions the year after his mother had left, when his nan was feeling particularly soft, nobody had ever expressed much in the way of that sentiment towards him either.

There were plenty of times when it would have been perfectly ideal to say it. When Gheorghe saved the life of a calf and its mother, whose loss would have been both fairly financially disastrous and emotionally depressing (it was Johnny's favorite cow, one he was prone to calling silly nicknames when no one was looking). When Gheorghe was giving him a backrub in the bath, late at night. When Gheorghe had picked a passel of wildflowers over at the far side of the field, and come striding towards the house with them bunched in his fist, and instead of handing them to Deidre as Johnny expected, had handed them to Johnny with the sweetest smile possible, a smile that could melt Johnny down to his toes.

The damn thing of it was that every time Johnny thought he’d worked up the courage and confidence to spit it out, Gheorghe seemed to intuit that Johnny was on edge, and would flutter those long dark lashes over those big hazel eyes, and smile, and Johnny would feel his lips drop open and his mouth go instantly dry as a bone. He’d spend the rest of the day kicking himself, his demon of self-doubt eating away at him. Gheorghe would be peacefully working across the yard, planting potatoes, and Johnny would be hammering a nail into a fence much harder than he needed to, screaming at himself internally. _You utter piece of shite. Stop being such a child. You’re never going to get him to stay here once he sees what the winters are like unless you give him some fucking reason_.

Then again maybe once he said it, once he exposed how desperately he wanted Gheorghe to stay here forever, or at least as long as it made him happy – dear god, he hoped it made Gheorghe happy – maybe once Gheorghe figured out what an aching, twitching ball of need for him that Johnny really was, he’d run for those hills back home that he was so fond of, no matter how much he said there was nothing to go back for. After all, Gheorghe had never said it to him, either, and it's not like HE was a coward who was useless at emotional communication.

So this was what all those stupid poems in school and those stupid telly dramas that his nan liked to swoon to on the sly were all about, then. Love. Too bad nobody ever bothered to tell you that in addition to being the most wonderful thing you ever felt in your life, it was also slow torture.

_Just tell him tonight, before you go to sleep._

_Tomorrow when you wake up._

_Right before the work starts, so that if he doesn’t say it back, you’ll be too busy to kill yourself and you can just pretend it didn’t happen._

_At sunset. Take him up on the hill and have a moment, like. It’ll remind him of that first week. He’ll like that. Romantic_. Gheorghe was romantic, even when doing the simplest things like opening doors for Johnny, fingercombing his hair in the morning when his cowlicks were sticking up all over, singing him little songs in Romanian while they worked. Johnny didn’t know how to be romantic and he felt woefully inadequate when he even considered attempting to try.

It was like Gheorghe had walked into his life straight out of one of his wildest dreams and he was terrified that if he broke the spell, if he said the wrong words, or didn’t say the right ones, he would just vanish straight into thin air.

Well, fuck it. One thing was for certain. Johnny was going to die if he didn’t tell him. The words chanted in his head all day long, and they were driving him mad. _I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you_. His heart pounded like a drum to the beat of the words, and though he fully expected to drop dead on this farm someday, he'd prefer it to happen when he was old and tired, in his peaceful bed, surrounded by Gheorghe's warm arms, rather than because he was too gutless to tell the man that was what he wanted.

***

Johnny decided to practice saying it to the lamb, the runty one that Gheorghe had brought to life early in the spring. It was a thriving little thing now, albeit rather ungainly, its legs longer than its frame suggested they should be, seeming like they gained another inch every day. It gamboled a bit crookedly across the field as Johnny chased it into its pen. It was hard not to smile at it. He reached into the pen and scratched its head gently, but it shook him off and did a funny dance, stamping down the hay.

"Ay, don't need your ol' man petting you anymore, do you," Johnny's smile stretched a little wider. He looked around furtively to make sure nobody was within a mile, then leaned over the pen and whispered, "I love you, you cheeky little bugger." His eyes softened. "I do, actually."

The lamb bleated back at him, and he scratched under its chin. There was a time not so long ago when Johnny had hated every animal on this farm, because he'd hated his life, and every one of them just represented another burden. Now, in the fullness of summer, he remembered that lambs were easy to love, that nature made them that way. Furry, soft, warm and adorable. Like Gheorghe. Not like Johnny, all hard angles & knobby elbows and skin that always seemed cold, even in July, until Gheorghe touched it and the warmth spread from his fingers everywhere.

Surely, even if he didn't quite love Johnny yet, Gheorghe must feel some spark of deep feeling for him, or he wouldn't have come back, and he wouldn't stay here. He could go anywhere, he was capable of doing a lot of things, but he chose to stay here. He cared about every living thing he encountered, granted, but he was especially thoughtful and tender towards Johnny; even Johnny could see and admit that much. He resolved to tell him how he felt that night.

***

But night was here, and Gheorghe wasn't. He'd gone up the hill to check on the pasturing sheep while Johnny fed the cows and got them bedded down, a trip that should have only taken an hour at most, up and back. Three hours later, he still wasn't back home. They'd eaten supper (or at least Deidre and Martin had; Johnny barely managed to choke anything down), given Martin a bath and put him to bed, and Gheorghe still wasn't there.

Johnny sat perched against a windowsill, chewing his thumbnail, while Deidre ironed and said dryly, "gnawing your hand off i'nt gonna bring him back any faster". Johnny didn't respond. Anything could have happened. He could have rolled the quad bike over on himself, and be dying in a ditch. He could have left again.

Finally, a half-hour after the last ray of sun had officially disappeared over the horizon, he could see headlights coming down the trail, and Deidre let out a sigh of relief. That faker! She'd been worried too. "Now, don't go overreac--" she started to caution him, but Johnny had already bolted out the front door like he'd been shot out of a cannon.

"Where the fuck were you!" Johnny yelled hoarsely as Gheorghe turned the engine off and dismounted, looking at him with surprise.

"One of the rams got out, knocked down a bit of wall. I guess he liked the way the neighbor's lady sheep smell better. Took me a while to wrestle him back and put up a temporary blockade," Gheorghe explained, pulling his gloves off. "I'm sorry. I hope you didn't wait for supper."

"Who the fuck cares about supper. I thought you were dead! Or that you just took off," Johnny struggled to get the words out, he could feel sobs rising in his throat and he refused to let them out.

"John. I'm not going anywhere," Gheorghe said gently. "You know I wouldn't do that. I certainly wouldn't steal your equipment to do it."

Johnny made an odd strangled sound, and before he could stop himself, blurted out "All I know is that I love you and if anything happens to you or to us, I think I'm going to die".

Gheorghe looked at him with an unfathomable expression for a moment, and then his eyes began to crinkle and his mouth slowly spread into a smile as he reached to caress Johnny's face softly. "You're not going to die. But I'll do my best not to let anything bad happen to us. I promise you, John. Do you believe me?"

Johnny didn't respond, still choked up, but he leaned his face into Gheorghe's hand, rubbing against it like a kitten. He loved when Gheorghe called him "John", just plain simple John. It made him feel like a grown man, like he was important. He took a deep breath, feeling his heart rate slow down. "I do," he said finally, "I believe you."

"I'm sorry I made you worry," Gheorghe said soothingly, wrapping his arms around him. "I was just thinking that we should get some of those things, you know, handheld radios. I would have called you, but you know my phone doesn't work up here."

"They're called walkie-talkies," Johnny muttered against Gheorghe's shoulder, squeezing him tightly and closing his eyes briefly before opening them again and shoving him away. "Hey. Wait a tick. You missed something, I think." He looked down bashfully, scuffing his foot against the ground. "Aren't you supposed to say it back? Isn't that how this is supposed to work, I mean."

Gheorghe reached beneath his chin and gently tilted his face upwards, so that their eyes met again. He murmured something in Romanian, a phrase Johnny didn't understand, and added afterwards, in English, "that means of course I love you. I was just waiting for you to say it first."

"Wot!" Johnny burst into a grin, but feigned mock offense. "Why would you do that to poor little old me, I wonder."

"I thought it would make you happier if you said it first," Gheorghe smiled, and Johnny felt it again, that warmth melting him down to his toes. "My brave man. My knight in shining armor."

"Get on with ye," Johnny scoffed, but didn't stop grinning from ear to ear, and he leaned in to kiss Gheorghe deeply. They stayed there in the yard kissing for a long time, as the moon rose over the hill, until they heard loud classical music drifting from Deidre's room -- her signal that she'd be asleep soon enough so if they could just keep it down for 15 minutes they wouldn't hear any wry comments tomorrow about how ghosts must be rattling the walls these days.

Johnny broke away, still smiling, and without another word, took Gheorghe's hand in his and led him inside.

***

**Author's Note:**

> People in Yorkshire probably don’t use the terms “4-wheelers” or “walkie-talkies” so if someone from the area can tell me what words they do use I’d be happy to edit. Also apologies for any wrong details about farm life.
> 
> I, too, love that lamb.


End file.
